


The Tides of the Heart

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-17
Updated: 2014-01-17
Packaged: 2018-01-09 02:35:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Sherlock Holmes is drowning in all that he aches for John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tides of the Heart

It’s not a blessing, nor a curse, so to speak. It doesn’t inconvenience me-- It doesn’t make me in any way happier, lighter, but neither does it snap me straight down my core, crippling me like I thought it would. It’s not agony. But it is, it somewhat is.

Perhaps.

I don’t really comprehend.

You see.

You must understand that maybe I.

I am adrift.

My love for you has completely and utterly numbed me and simultaneously overwhelmed me with feeling. It is a nonentity - irrelevant, in a minimally larger perspective, but here, where I stand right at this moment, it is everything I long for and everything I am desperate to be ridden of. Remove it from my sight so my skin no longer perpetually sings with closeness - even when you are miles and decades and entire lives away from me.

And yet sometimes I look at starlight that no one can really see - shrouded in the light pollution of thousands upon thousands of people living thousands upon thousands of inconsistent and meaningless lives; all of them feel that, they, themselves, one pointless consciousness in a form so insignificant they practically don’t exist, have a right to drown the crystalline everness and the miniscule infinity that is the universe - when I look at that starlight I notice my _love_ , a feeling I cannot profess to entirely grasp the concept of, despite knowing with assuredness and confidence that it vibrates through my every cell; my love that, when compared to all of the nuclear fusion and reactions so simple they allow life itself to blossom (they allow us a life in which we are able to love), is nothing.

I, you, us: We are nothing and isn’t that liberating? Isn’t that so entirely terrifying that sometimes I wonder how I am still breathing under the pressure of it all? Why does this- this confession and its consequences sit so heavy in my chest when it will not provide life or remove it in its absence? The logic is long estranged, but I know that those words could never pass my lips so explicitly.

It’s not a blessing, no.

I am drowning under the weight of it, the sheer volume and density that fills my lungs when I attempt foolishly to breathe. I am not drowning in you, you understand. Nor is it your hand that forces my head under again and again in a kind of relentless, sick torture - it is my own palms that push me beneath these waves and I cannot blame you for standing so, so far back on dry land that you are ignorant to how the salt _burns_ me.

I am drowning in my complete adoration for you, John Watson.

This sea is awash with confusion and I can’t exactly work out why I am unable to just stand and flood myself with tides of relief but I am trying, fighting, struggling under these currents. I want nothing more - I have never wanted anything more - than to raise my head and breathe you in, all of you into my throat, my larynx, my trachea, my lungs; I would expand my chest cavity as wide as I could force it (I would prise apart my ribs if I could, just to let more of you, all of you in) and you would bring such sweet, dire relief that it would be a wonder if I didn’t simply become nothingness with every breath of you, if I didn’t become a black hole that just took and took until we would both be together in the unchartered darkness where no one would remember us.

I am drowning, yes, starving for oxygen but I can never fall into the bliss of unconsciousness and I can never get to the surface just mere millimetres away, but I can see the air shimmering beyond it with tragically wasted sunbeams, their beauty trivial and mocking in all of their hollow promises. Not you, though. Never you.

Although I can feel your omnipresence in my mind.

But I am the preventative factor. Me. So experienced in some fields and so bereft entirely of others, the ones that seem to matter, that hurt. My ignorance has always cost me dearly but never in this, never in a matter that seems my only options are either life or death but in reality, I am still breathing. I am not starved for oxygen, yet it burns just the same. The saltwater is eternal in its stinging, so I know- I know that I have to reach the air, I have to survive, but oh.

If I only knew how.


End file.
